To dig out this great treasure and to scream out the truth...

On 18 September 1946, from under the ruins of the school at 68 Nowolipki street, located in the former ghetto, ten metal boxes were dug out. The boxes protected a great treasure – the first part of the secret Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known as the Ringelblum Archive. Unearthing the Archive was possible because Hersz Wasser, a member of the Oneg Shabbat group, survived the Holocaust and knew the location of the treasure.
The idea of the Archive came from Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian and researcher of Polish-Jewish relations. He established the Oneg Shabbat group (Hebrew: „The Joy of Sabbath”), which collected and documented accounts of life in the Ghetto and outside. Harrowing testimonies of Nazi crimes were hidden in the ground soon before the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
The group’s activity was entirely secret. Its members stemmed from various social groups and milieus, represented various worldviews and interests. Some of them were responsible for documentation and evidence, others collected and edited accounts of people. Some kept track of daily life in the Ghetto, others provided their own accounts, research papers or works of literature. Together, they had created an Archive comprising over 35,000 pages, including: 746 accounts, diaries and memoirs, 380 volumes of official documents, 120 research papers, 88 works of literature, 76 photographs and 54 titles of underground press. The Archive – a unique testimony of life and extermination of Polish Jews – was included in 1999 on UNESCO’s „Memory of the World” list, comprising the most significant documents of written word.
On 18 September 2017, we commemorate exactly 71 years since the first part of the Archive was unearthed.
This date is also a symbolic day for the Jewish Historical Institute, which will celebrate its 70th anniversary on 1 October. The Institute’s location became the building at Tłomackie 5 (current adress Tłomackie 3/5) – renovated edifice of the pre-war Judaistic Sciences Institute and the Central Judaistic Library. This is the place where the Archive was created, and where it remains until present day.
On the anniversary of unearthing the Ringelblum Archive, its heirs – the Association of Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the Jewish Historical Institute – initiate a long-standing program of activities aimed at popularising knowledge about the Oneg Shabbat group, commemorating its members, and making the Archive resources available in Poland and abroad. We follow the will of the Oneg Shabbat group members, written down by Dawid Graber – one of three people who participated in hiding the first part of the Archive – in his testament:
„ I don’t want thanks. It suffices if future generations will remember our days (…) I would like to live long enough to see the moment in which this great treasure can be unearthed, and the truth can be screamed out. Let the world know. (…) I hope this treasure will find its way into the right hands, that it will survive until better times. May it alert the world about the events of the 20th century”.
18 September 2017 marks a symbolic date of the program launch, but works on the Archive have been continuing since its unearthing. The first phase comprised mainly securing the documents and conservation works, followed by the next stage – critical edition. The complete edition of the Ringelblum Archive – consisting of 36 volumes – is a result of shared efforts of the Jewish Historical Institute researchers and many historians, sociologists, philosophers, literature scholars, editors and renowned translators. Together, they had managed to bring to the light many unclear or previously undecoded documents, which – arranged by subject – provide a source of knowledge about the fate of Jews in occupied Poland. In the future, the Archive will be translated to such languages as English, German and Spanish. The first volume in English, The Warsaw Ghetto, will be published this November.
The original documents are undergoing conservation and digitalization. Currently, all the volumes of the Ringelblum Archive are available online at the Central Jewish Library website – JHI’s digital repository. For early October 2017, we plan to launch the Delet webportal, which will present the most outstanding resources from the Institute’s and Association’s collection, including scans of original documents from the Ringelblum Archive.
The key point of the Oneg Szabat program is opening of the permanent exhibition, What we’ve been unable to shout out to the world..., dedicated to the creators of the Ringelblum Archive, planned for November 2017. It will present oryginal documents from this special collection to the public – first time in 70 years. A mobile version of the Archive will be available in the most renowned museums of the world.
By the end of 2017, we will begin works on the Encyclopedia of the Warsaw Ghetto – a long-scale project undertaken by historians. It will be a semantic database, which – using the documents from the Ringelblum Archive – will make available online the most important subjects related to the Warsaw Ghetto, retrace its topography, publish information about people who were living there, their life conditions, terror and the forthcoming Holocaust.
18 September 2017 marks the symbolic launch of the program popularising the Ringelblum Archive, but activities included in the program have been implemented by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute for many years. Its important part are singular and cyclical cultural and academic events, aimed at promotion and education. The members of the Oneg Shabbat group were commemorated in a special way during the 22 July Memory March this year; the story of the Archive and its creators are told by JHI educators during thematic walks in Warsaw.
The goal of all activities which both institutions have been pursuing for 71 years is to fulfil the will of the Oneg Shabbat members, who – as Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in „The Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto” — „have made the greatest sacrifice”, so that we can acknowledge their effort „on the day of freedom, and reward it with highest possible prizes in free Europe”.
For the first time in history, everyone can contribute to popularisation and commemoration of the Ringelblum Archive. Via the http://onegszabat.org/en/ website, everyone can submit a donation (among others – for the purposes of preservation and translation of the Archive), read the history of the Oneg Shabbat group and the biographies of its members. The multimedia site is available in Polish, English and Hebrew. Collection of funds will last for 12 months.
Further information about the Ringelblum Archive and the Oneg Shabbat group can be found at: http://onegszabat.org/en/ and http://www.jhi.pl/en/ringelblum-archive, as well as on the Oneg Szabat program Facebook and Twitter profiles.
[ Sources: AR, Dzienniki z getta warszawskiego (Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto), vol. 23, ed. Katarzyna Person, Zofia Trębacz, Michał Trębacz; Emanuel Ringelblum, Kronika getta warszawskiego (The Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto), transl.. Adam Rutkowski, Czytelnik, Warsaw 1983.]
The Oneg Szabat Program is implemented by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, within a public-private partnership.

Delet Portal

Delet Portal has been created in order to present the most precious collections owned by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute (AJHI) and the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) in an innovative way. These collections include the Oneg Shabbat collection, which is listed on the Memory of the World Register by UNESCO. This unique collection of documents that survived the Holocaust was created as a result of heroic endeavors of a group of people gathering reports, documents and conducting their own research in the ghetto. They eventually hid the collection in a house at Nowolipki 68 St. The Oneg Shabbat collection, i.e. the underground archives of the Warsaw ghetto, is a priceless document reporting the events of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Delet portal makes it possible to use these materials for research and educational purposes.
Thanks to specially designed tools, the users are able to work on illegible and decrepit document fragments, which is particularly useful when working with manuscripts. Digitalized high-resolution documents are easy to work with, as the researcher can change color saturation, contrast and other image properties. This can preserve the priceless legacy that is so fragile that it is not made available to the readers. Digital copies of the highest quality are designed to be presented on the Web and allow every user to check even the tiniest details without the risk of damaging the documents.
The tools of Delet portal can also be used during virtual lessons, which make it much easier and more effective to share the knowledge about Oneg Shabbat group led by Emanuel Ringelblum. The users can create valuable and interesting educational materials with the ability to add annotations, enlarge and highlight the crucial parts of the documents. The authors of the portal would like to reach the students of schools and universities, as well as all others interested in the lives of Jews and their culture.
The portal's resources offer other collections apart from Oneg Shabbat.
We would like to continue the mission of preserving and spreading the artistic legacy of Polish Jews, which started with Józef Sandel and later was continued by his wife, Ernestyna Podhorizer-Sandel. That is why AJHI and JHI Delet portal shares digital copies of works of art. These works constitute an important part of the Jewish legacy. Delet collections include not only paintings, drawings and sketches, but also wood engravings, copies and spatial forms. Creating your own collections and creating lessons based on them presents an opportunity to gain knowledge of Jewish art and to share your findings with other users of the portal.
The collections presented on Delet portal, Oneg Shabbat and works of art, provide the users with an exceptional chance to become digital educators, researchers and guides within their own "digital exhibitions". Researchers will gain the ability to work on document copies from collections that are gradually being described with meta data by the Archive and Library Resources Edition Department of JHI. The authors of the portal are confident that the shared materials shall become a source of inspiration and knowledge for history enthusiasts and a great help for scientists.

Permanent exhibition „What we were unable to shout out to the world” dedicated to the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto and to its creators

On 16 November, the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Association of the JHI of Poland will present to the public – for the first time – documents collected by the secret group Oneg Shabbat. The exhibition is one of the key elements of the Oneg Szabat program.
The documents form the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, founded by Emanuel Ringelblum, historian and social activist. He gathered together a group of people who documented the life and death of the Warsaw Ghetto. When they realized that the Ghetto will be liquidated, and themselves – along with others – will be transported to a death camp, they buried the documents in a basement of the Borokhov school at Nowolipki 68. They survived in hiding from 1946 and 1950, when the second part of the archives was found. The documents were rediscovered and recovered from the remains of the Ghetto only thanks to the fact that Hersz Wasser, one of the people who knew the location, survived the Holocaust.
The Archive is one of the most important testimonies about the Holocaust of Polish Jews – not only due to diversity and documentary value of collected materials. More than anything, it is a record of the Holocaust as seen by its victims. As Paweł Śpiewak, Director of the JHI and curator of the exhibition, says: „They wrote the first history of the Holocaust. They were writing it every day, despite living in conditions of extreme indignity, living in fear of transports and death in a gas chamber, living in grief after loved ones”.
The title of the exhibition was taken from the testament left by Dawid Graber, who belonged to a group of people hiding the first part of the Archive. He wrote: „What we were unable to shout out to the world, we buried in the ground”. Dawid Graber was 19, and while hiding in a hurry last remaining boxes and milk cans with documents, he had one hope: „that future generations will recall our suffering and pain, that during the fall, there were also people who had the courage to do this work”.
The main subject of the exihibition will be activity of particular members of the group and the story of the Archive they created together – from its beginning until today. By a wooden table, which symbolizes a space of physical, intellectual and spiritual – as written by Emanuel Ringelblum — „kindred union” — we will present biographies of particular members and their contribution to the Archive. Selected fragments from diaries will illustrate the motivations of the Oneg Shabbat group; we will see, among others, original testaments left by Izrael Lichtensztajn, Gela Seksztajn, Nachum Grzywacz and Dawid Graber.
The documents-testimonies of the Holocaust will be presented in chronological order, which will illustrate the looming apocalypse – and the apocalypse happening. It will include materials about the extermination action in the Warsaw Ghetto and documents about the Treblinka death camp.
A separate part of the exhibition will be dedicated to the history of the group – from the moment of hiding the Archive until present day. We will display documents which describe the efforts of hiding the Archive, of its recovery and following stages of preservation, cataloguing. analysis, edition of the documents, up until including the Archive in the „Memory of the World” UNESCO register in 1999. We pay special attention to showing the physical dimension of documentation (damages, disappearing ink etc.), as well as to methods of reconstruction of damaged text – such as comparing subsequent copies of documents of hyperspectral imaging.
„We owe a great debt to these people. Their work is a testimony of courage and unique resistance. It wasn’t military resistance – it couldn’t have been. They had no rifles. They had enough imagination, enough awareness, to collect all documents of the Holocaust. The work of Oneg Shabbat allows us today to understand the fate of Jews in weeks, hours before death; to see the history from the perspective of the victims. To understand their despair, loneliness, fear. This is a special testimony”, says Professor Paweł Śpiewak.
On 16 November, the words of Dawid Graber, Nachum Grzywacz, Gela Seksztajn, Gustawa Jarecka and many others, who had no hope for living anymore, but still had hope for truth, will be heard at Tłomackie street again. As Emanuel Ringelblum wrote: „The world will ask: what did the people from the Warsaw Ghetto think about, when they already knew that they won’t escape death?”
The exhibition is curated by Professor Paweł Śpiewak.
The exhibition is one of the key elements of the Oneg Szabat Program, realised by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. The goal of the program is to commemorate and popularize the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (the Ringelblum Archive) and to commemorate the members of the Oneg Shabbat group.
The Oneg Szabat program has been initiated on the 70th anniversary of the JHI. It is being realised by the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland within a public-private partnership.
Exhibition Films and translations of the original materials were supported by the Jewish Federation of Canada - UIA and its program „March of the Living”.

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